Merkel Says Germany Needs 20GW of Fossil-Fuel Power Plants Over Next 10 Years

To Replace Nuclear Power Plants Scheduled to be Shut Down

Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, announced that her country would need to build a lot of fossil fuel power plants to pick up the slack from nuclear power plants that are scheduled to be shut down. She said: "If we want to exit nuclear energy and enter renewable energy, for the transition time we need fossil power plants. At least 10, more likely 20 gigawatts [of fossil capacity] need to be built in the coming 10 years."
Photo: Flickr, CC

The new power stations will be both gas- and coal-fired, Ms. Merkel said, adding that at the same time Germany wants to stick to its target of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 40% by 2020 from 1990 levels.

Michael Mueller, from the German Federation for Nature, said the climate targets can't be achieved if the additional fossil-fuel capacity were to be built, pointing to the energy industry's emissions calculations.

The switch-off of the first seven of Germany's 17 nuclear power stations will add some 25 million metric tons a year to the country's carbon-dioxide emissions, the International Energy Agency said in May.

This is very unfortunate because massive coal plants and natural gas plants aren't built to be used only a few years. This new dirty electricity production capacity will no doubt stick around for a few decades, adding that much more CO2 (and other air pollutants) to the atmosphere.

It might have been better to keep Germany's existing nuclear power plants operational and do a thorough safety review so that they can be used until a transition to renewables can be done directly (without having to build a large amount of new fossil fuel plants). Fukushima is a disaster, but it was avoidable, and adding billions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere isn't without consequences either.